Lifecycle of a Collector: Pound of Flesh

Collectors like studio visits. They are often a sign of special status, an occasion for close conversation with the artist, a glimpse of the working process, a brief dip into the well- springs of creativity along with the possibility of seeing – and getting first dibs on – new work. These might all be reasons artists some- times dread them.

In her 2021 study Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art is Created and Judged, sociologist Hannah Wohl argues that at a time when there is no such thing as talent or taste in art, what collectors buy when they buy a work of art is essentially an artist’s identity. We might dispute her claim about talent and taste but her formulation that in purchasing discrete and disparate objects collectors are in the game of buying artists’ “creative visions” seems sound. Collectors buy the artist’s unique perspective, a quality somehow bound up in the artist’s identity as much as in the work that gets made. Having acquired the work – those things in the world that objectify this creative vision – some collectors want more. They want to share that unique perspective by seeing its theatre of operations, the artist’s studio.

This can be a fraught situation. Artists don’t necessarily want collectors in their studio and they don’t always want to have to explain their work or processes, however much they might have rehearsed this in art school critiques. Not every artist is congenial; some are positively rude. The studio can be the home of failure, of false starts and work left unresolved. Even artists who are poor judges of their own work grasp this and it’s a tremendous disincentive to welcoming strangers who know only the successful works. Dealers, who benefit from sales that may result from a studio visit, have a clear role here, easing the way for both artists and collectors as well as controlling access.

In the annals of collecting two stories indicate the importance of the studio visit, and the desire of artists to shake its burden. Don and Mera Rubell, whose Rubell Family Collection/ Contemporary Art Foundation opened in Miami in 1995, began their collection of some 7,000 works with a purchase made from a studio visit in 1965. Today they rarely buy work from artists whose studios they haven’t first visited. Decades before in New York, Modernist patrons Walter and Louise Arensberg rented Marcel Duchamp a studio with an eye to access to his newest work. He returned the favour by letting artist Beatrice Wood use the studio instead.